Dust Promotion

Before the holidays I talked about promoting fine crafting materials into higher levels. Of the 8 different classes of fine materials I talked about 7 of them and said I would discuss the 8th, piles of dust, another day. Well today is that day. I have earned enough skill points to run a number of conversions to attempt to find the average number of tier 6 dust gained from a single attempt at promoting a stack of tier 5 dust. 

Tier 1-6 Piles of Dust

The Formula

The formula for converting dust is a little different than the rest of the promotion formula. For starters you need to begin with a whole stack, 250, of the lower tier dust and you need to use crystals and philosophers stones. The formula for dust promotion is as follows;

  250 Piles of Tier X Dust
+ 1 Pile of Tier X+1 Dust
+ 5 Crystals
+ 5 Philosopher's Stones
= random # of Piles of Tier X+1 Dust

If that looks complicated do not worry it is not. Simply pick which dust you wish to promote. It will being anything from 1 through 5. This is the value of X in the above formula. If you wish to promote tier 5 dust to tier 6 dust, as I will in my trails below, than the formula you should use is as follows;

250 Piles of Incandescent Dust
+ 1 Pile of Crystalline Dust
+ 5 Crystals
+ 5 Philosopher's Stones
= random number of Piles of Crystalline Dust

The mystic forge, loaded and ready to go to convert
250 Incandescent Dust into a random number of Crystalline Dust

My Trails

For my trial I had 4250 Piles of Incandescent Dust which I converted into Piles of Crystalline Dust. Each attempt costs 5 crystals and 5 philosophers stones or in other words 3.5 skill points. The cost of 250 Piles of Radiant Dust is 62.5 silver or 25 copper each. Here are my results,

4250 Piles of Incandescent Dust
+ 17 Pile of Crystalline Dust
+ 85 Crystals
+ 85 Philosopher's Stones
= 341 Piles of Crystalline Dust

Removing the Piles of Dust required for the recipe leaves us with 324 piles of Crystalline Dust. Averaging this out results in about 19 piles of dust per pull. I would be able to sell my Crystalline Dust for about 5.66 silver each at the moment. Selling each Crystalline Dust for 5.66 silver I would take 107.5 silver on average per attempt before trading post fees. After the fees I would have revenue of  91.4 silver. Taking into account my costs (62.5 silver per pull) I would make on average 28.9 silver per pull or in other words 8.25 silver per skill point.

The most common result on promoting Incandescent Dust.

We can generalize the profit formula for converting dust as follows;

Profit = (A * 0.85 * X) - (250 * B)
  where,
    A = Current Sale price of Crystalline Dust
    B = Current Purchase price of Incandescent Dust
    X = # of Crystalline Dust per 250 Incandescent Dust

This formula merely needs you to go to the Trading Post and fill in the values for A and B. Than if my trials are to show anything you will average roughly 19 Crystalline Dust for each stack of 250 Incandescent Dust. If you are doing smaller trails than you could end up with more or less. The most I gained from a single attempt was 38, where as the least I gained from a single attempt was 10 (here are the raw numbers, 14, 34, 15, 20, 12, 18, 17, 38, 10, 13, 15, 18, 15, 21, 33, 18, 13). If you wish to determine your profits per skill point divide the above formula by 3.5 as that is the number of skill points needed per attempt.

Conclusions

As you can see from just comparing the two articles promoting dust is no where near as profitable as converting the other fine crafting materials. If you are looking to purely make gold from your skill points, thus far, the best option is to promote the most expensive tier 6 fine crafting mat from its tier 5 mat. I hope you found this discussion of promoting of dusts interesting even if it did not end up as being a profitable venture.

I have still not tried converting Cores into Lodestones to see if there is profit there; however, since there is no random amounts involved in the Core or Lodestone promotion I will be able to simply do the math to determine the profits from those conversions. I will write this article up later in the week and then follow up next week with a general article on converting Skill Points into gold.